बैंगलोर राजधानी

हिलती डुलती ट्रेन पे मैं सुन्न बैठा हूँ

इस असमंजस में की ये कैसी यात्रा है

जिसमें एक आवारा गति की दिशा में

अबोध बढ़ते जा रहे हैं हम सब

हम ऐसी अनोखी निर्बलता से लदे हुए हैं

की दुख भी उबासी में मिल गया है

लेकिन इस खालीपन में भी कुछ है

जो तोड़ रहा है  मेरे मन की चुप्पी

खिड़की के बाहर जो स्थिर साधारण दुनिया है

वो खिड़की के अंदर की कृत्रिम नीरस व्यवस्था

के विपरीत, कितनी मनमोहक है

इन छोटे जर्जर मकानों के बाहर की रोशनी

मानो अपनी क्रूर अव्यवस्थित टिमटिमाहट में

सभ्यता का बोझिल इतिहास दिखा रही हो

वहीं खिड़की के इस तरफ व्यवस्था ने

धीरे धीरे सभ्यता को शौचालय तक धकेल दिया है

और गति बढ़ती जा रही है

परतें

जब खत्म कर दूं ये कविता

तो खोलना तह बा तह

इस कविता की परतें

सबसे ऊपर मिलेगा वही पुराना विद्रोह

वही शरीर की बदलती जरूरतों को ढकने की पोषाक

थोड़ा गुरुर और थोड़ी सी हिम्मत

और नीचे जाओगे तो देखोगे

की पड़ी हैं मेरी मैली आदतें

मेरा पूर्वाग्रह और मेरी कमजोरियां

जिनको न जाने किस आकार में मोड़-मरोड़ के बना रखा है मैंने वास्तुशिल्प का अद्वितीय नमूना और रंग दिया है उन्हें बाज़ार के विचारों से ताकि आने जाने वालों को आभास न हो उनकी कुरूपता का

जब पहुंच जाओ तीसरी परत तक

तब लेना एक विराम

और नाज़ुक हांथों से उठाना मेरी बचपन में बनाई दुनिया की तस्वीर

ढूंढोगे तो मिलेगा उस तस्वीर में एक सिहरता हुआ यथार्थ जो ढका होगा न जाने कितनी जलती हुई परतों के मोम से

ये विकृतियों का मोम है जो टपकता चला गया मेरी दुनिया की तस्वीर पर

तब जब मैं बना रहा था अपनी दुनिया

शायद एक दुनिया बनाने के लिए दूसरी को खोखला करना ही नियम हो दुनिया का

पर अगर हटा पाओ ठंडी मोम तो देखना उस खोखली तस्वीर के आर-पार

और शायद तुम पाओगे की इस कविता की कोख में रखी है एक पोटली हार

हर उस बार जब मैं गिर के उठ नहीं पाया था

जब मैंने झुका लिया था सिर

जब मान लिया था मैंने खुद को बेबस

जब खो दिया था मैंने अपना विश्वास

जब नोचने लगा था मैं अपनी आत्मा

जब स्वीकार कर ली थी मैंने अपनी दयनीयता

तब                      तब                     तब

तभी शायद हुआ था सृजन इन परतों का

उस हार के पहले बीज से

और जितना हारते जाते हैं हम

उतनी ही जटिल होती जाती हैं हमारी कविताएं

अब जब भी लिखूंगा अगली कविता

तो कुछ परतें हटाऊंगा

कविता छोटी सही पर सरल बनाऊंगा।

UNKNOWN

Come looking for me someday

In the ruins of this unknown night

Come with your decorated wreaths & triumphant faces

Having celebrated your self-images

Come and scrounge this unknown night and its irksome eeriness

Nobody has been here and nobody's left

Only somebody kept waiting for nobody to come.

Come looking for me someday

In the ruins of this unknown night

Come and try to make sense of what's left

There's some noise bleeding out of the shattered glass

There's chunks of stinking honesty all over the floor

There's a feeble utterance hanging loosely on the wall

All meaning lies in a big heap in the corner of the night,

Drenched with reality and stupidity and time.

Come looking for me someday

In the ruins of this unknown night

Come and clean up this mess atleast

You mustn't preserve the unknown

Gather me in a box and label me 'fragile'

And dump me in an abandoned mailbox somewhere

Address me to the next unknown night

To be dispatched in perpetuity.

Shouldn't we Hope

Hope has been regarded quite profoundly by radical thinkers as a bardic, lyrical & baseless human value built upon unreasonable pretensions. Existentialism advocates that through hope humans seek to leap and deny the arbitrariness of life. In a universe where nothingness trumps humanity & logic seems desirable, hope is abstractly contrived. Hope can never influence fate. Hope, through a blind act of human confidence, seeks to explain everything. Thus as Albert Camus remarks "The absurd becomes God and the inability to understand becomes the existence that illuminates everything!!!"                                                                                                                                            I do not dismiss any of these charges. Hope in all its commonness has indeed been levied upon us by time or through ancestry. My wish is to rediscover hope as an understated gem of the human intellect. I do not wish to hold on to a blinding hope of vileness and ignorance.I do not wish for some great idea that will transcend my life and give it meaning or in other words simply betray it. I wish to hope for a coherent & indistinguishable recognition of the implacable grandeur of reality. My hope is that randomness is celebrated over importance & that the freedom that comes with unimportance is cherished.

Shouldn’t we hope?

And what else is there but hope

Though Hope doesn’t make us great or wise

It makes us weaker, inferior, susceptible to humanity

Hope transcends into faith

It is a deceitful agreement 

 making hopelessness bearable.

Yet, today I choose to hope.

I am opening more doors today

For I do not have strength enough to deny

I cannot choose reluctance over irrelevance

I cannot deny myself

I am too real, too abstract to escape

And thus I hope I can respect reality in it's entirety

I hope I can engage and confront

I hope I have Hope.

I choose to cry today

For in tears I see the hope of trust.

A hope that I can accept what is,

Universally inexistent, yet undeniably mine

This love and this gladness

This anxiety and this revulsion.

I hope my happiness betrays my disappointment

That my poetry never abandons my tears.

I choose to pray today

For in faith I see the hope of belief

A belief that I can be greater than my fears

That knowledge will not be accompanied by apathy

That worthiness willn’t be worshipped over tranquillity

That prayer willn’t be born out of isolation, escapism

I hope faith becomes our spectacles and not our eyes

I hope life grants us all, Simplicity of hope

I have a choice today to make

A choice having no varying consequence

for my distinction lies not between hope and despair

but between beginnings, ends & exclamations

I choose my life over my existence

Existence is forgetfulness;it is stagnant,perforated,lacks virtue

Life is fluid, It is a miraculous engine of love

My hope is to become life, to become a mad poet's delight.

IN A QUEST FOR INSPIRATION

It's amazing what a moment of emptiness will do to a suffocated mind. I use the word "suffocated" not to portray the bemusement of our everyday lives but rather to emphasize the sheer blindness of a polarized life. I have been accused in the past for being lousy in my implications & in-idiosyncratic in my writing & I thoroughly accept the latter. I do find it very rigorous to pen down personal experiences & try to overshadow it by personifying the "wonders of our being".Even as I scribble down this acceptance, I feel a very strong urge to replace the "I's" with "Humans".But I am determined to let the "I" take over at least for this solitary instance & so have put my vanity to rest in order to prevent any stiffened statements.

My indifference to conclusions & convictions is justified by the fact that I am an inspiration driven machine. It is the very fulcrum that modulates, what is an unpredictable thought process. Being uninspired is a very painful & exhaustive experience for me. (though a confession that must be made here is that at one odd instance my state of in-inspiration turned out to be nothing more than just an upset stomach)
Perhaps My state of in-inspiration is only an elevated expression for motion sickness in the grand journey of awareness, Just a sudden shock of realization of that awareness being effaced away brutally by the deafening scarcity of answers & the humongous abundance of perplexities. But just as my self-attested predictions only allow me casual escapes from such meekness, even so, my relatively idiotic personal worries raise equally absorbing questions.
As these idiotic worries deepen, I have to put the more cumbersome ones behind. So for once skipping the malleable questions like "whether our existence is a part of a great design or just some randomness in the whole cosmological romanticism" I will move towards the more general questions that a 17.5-year-old is supposed to raise obviously teenage crisis.

As I bid farewell to my childhood, seeing it struggle to co-exist with a rational & more critical mindset, I feel closer to being "normal" than I ever thought I was. I have had flashes of emotions that I believed could only be garnered in homo-sapiens of the "inferior" quality.Emotions like loneliness,attachment & penance.However, the one that has lingered for an atrocious period of time is that of Loss. With the curtains of my childhood drawing to a close, I feel to be losing out on my birthright of being unreasonable. It is an exceptionally intimidating & daunting prospect for me to always talk sense as it stakes the very vicissitudes of my consciousness.No wonder I always fancied Kahil Gibran's lines from "Sand & Foam" for myself "Half of what I say is meaningless but I say it so that the other half may reach you."I gather that my reluctance to be reasonable itself simplifies my state of in-inspiration. Perhaps it is not something as complex as searching for significant reasons to exist but something as elementary as being unsure about what to do next or just an ungraceful & despairing day of life.

Even though I cannot shower flowers of in-obstinacy or purpose on my peculiar morality of being positive, simplistic, happy, unjustified & inspired(the in-inspired moments are strong but negligible)I can always fabricate realities for myself & these realities are strong enough to serve my buffet of intrinsic rebellions. Others may simply call it a lie but then who can claim to know the truth.
Amidst all this mayhem, my fundamental chaos, however, remains duly characterized. The transient ambiguity of existence always seizes to trouble me through its mist of horrible familiarity & fatiguing irrelevance. Yet, when the cosmic fairy presents before me the lollipop of poetic ambience as a re-compensation against the eccentricities of life & the insignificance of anything & everything then despite having the knowledge of the lollipop being just a substance of momentary ecstasy, I sin by grasping it with bond hands& dwell merely on an extensive exaggeration of some lunatic Poet's delight.   
        

WATER

                                                  

                                                 Let us Be Water for Once

For once leave aside your God

& be one yourself

A dimensioned God

For once be obscured and powerless

rend apart your intellect

Let importance lose reason for once

& to this atonal rhyme lend your life for once

and embark along in symphony with me

Let us Be Water for Once

For once dismiss the ornate obeisance

For once unplug your pecuniary pride

& don't be good or bad for once

and stand unlearned and mutable for once

Forget your civilization

Forget your voluntarism for once

Stop singing your psalms for once

And for once be reclusive & stand,

Stand thankless, uninspired, unmotivated, unjustified,

unopposed, unadorned and artless in the fierce copper Sun.

For once flow naked towards the horizon

Deciphering new punctuations

Walk on three limbs for once

and start afresh from nought

Discard the written hallucinations

Decay the decorum for once

Disprove the caricatures of Shakespeare's seven ages

& breathe, breathe a breath without your dignity

For once if only we could peek beyond the borders of thought

& look ahead, ahead towards love, death, life & water for once.

If only man could be water for once

Sans regard and reputation

Sans humanity and domination

end would no longer be forbidden & untold

& He could have gravity as his pitiless God

He could be still, merciless and fore-long

As a colourless matter, he could rule and shine

& could end his timeless envy with time.

           

          

                 

MY GRANDFATHER'S DEATH

It is not often that I write about proper nouns 'cause my conscience prevents me from writing about personal loss or bereavement. Also, I am an overly romantic believer of the fact that if you come from a difficult place and that is all you have to write about then you should stop writing. Further, I could acknowledge a million reasons why I am not the right man to write about "Acharya Shri Nirmal Chandra", The Gandhian reformer. There are people more qualified and dignified than me who can do that.
However, the person I could write about was my Baba and how he completely changed my concept about God, unknowingly.

My Grandfather died on the 15th of May 2013 at around 2 p.m. while holding my hand. I saw the most moral man of my life struggle to breathe in his last hours & yet I couldn't accumulate pity over his penance. Instead, I was angry (furious to an extent) I wanted to order him to stand up at once. Standing there, wailing at the painful sight of a man I loved, wrap into his end I wished to complain to whoever I could and that was when a realization struck me.

 That was when I wanted to believe that there exists a higher authority, A supreme being who could cure him irrespective of what his blood sugar indicated or whatever rubbish came out of the ultrasonography. I demanded the existence of A GOD.

Now when I recall that helplessness of mine I gather that just as my denial or refusal of the existence of a superior being will owe me nothing. Even so, my denial of an unalterable law or a lawgiver(I assume both to be the same)will never liberate me from its operation. And as the "first proper noun I ever wrote about" M.K. Gandhi said, "Humble And Mute acceptance of a divine authority makes life's journey easier".It is his definition of God that rendered my Baba's intellect the most.

"In the midst of death life persists, In the midst of untruth truth persists, In the midst of darkness light persists. Hence I gather that God is Light, Truth, Life. He is Love. He is the supreme Good.

Coming Back to my Grandfather. He was a man close to some of the mightiest leaders of India. Right From Dr Rajendra Prasad to Vinoba Bhave and a little brother to Jayprakash Narayan. Yet If there is one word in the English Dictionary That best describes Him it is "HUMBLE".Or at least that was how I knew him to be. He was My first teacher, the best too. He taught me everything right from calculating to drawing to writing. He used to teach me several mantras & I am ashamed that I have forgotten most of those. And I am sorry that I am unable to write much about him. It is only this little Homage That I am capable of. He was a man I knew in my family who had achieved supreme greatness socially and psychologically. Death came to him as a friend and he greeted it with incredible calmness.

I have heard of the philosophy of the 3 deaths. It says that every being on this planet dies thrice. The first death is when that man takes his last breath. The second is when he turns to dust and the third & the most painful is when his name is taken for the last time on earth. I am incredibly sure that that third death of my grandfather is still centuries away.
In my first post on this blog, I pondered quite superficially over death. Now I know it as an important part of a great life. The most beautiful part of a great man's life is that it ends. My Grandfather was an artist in every true sense of the word and his death was his greatest masterpiece.
                                               
                                                                                          A proud Grandson of a Worthy Grandfather